Is the era of vouchers for theme parks dead?

Ticket retailers for years have struggled with one of two solutions, manage ticket inventory or explaining vouchers.

Both solutions have their pros and cons, vouchers through the years began to get get a bad rap as guests would have to exchange these vouchers for the actual tickets, typically in a separate line where guest would could expect wait times of an hour or more during peak times.


In order to maintain "turn stile ready" ,some stuck to the traditional method of purchasing ticket inventory from all the attractions and theme parks. This brought unique challenges such as keeping up growing theme parks and growing their own company. Managing ticket inventory across several locations or outlets can become more than a full time job, it can become a nightmare for those in accounting. Compound that with hundreds of tickets and options and you can see where limited your offering would become necessary.

Vouchers worked great for timeshare and guest service companies alike, reaping benefits such as breakage. Few companies, issued very reputable vouchers and worked with theme parks and attractions to make sure all the appropriate verbiage was there to make billing an ease.
But with birth and rapid expansion of the internet, a few things rapidly changed. Vouchers became a very saturate market making it very challenging for theme parks and attractions to bill the appropriate reseller. With vouchers becoming some popular the line increased at the guest service line and complaints spiked from guests for standing in line for an hour in our warm summer months.

Online Shopping carts became main stream and allowing theme parks to sell their own tickets through a new venue that they themselves can manage. This allowed guests to print their own tickets at any time.

This online shopping has become a win win for both the theme parks and retailers as they could now offer turnstile ready tickets on demand, and the theme parks no longer have to track and manger voucher accounts.Currently, Disney already offers the DTC platform while Sea World offers EZ Ticketing for their retails.

However, this shopping cart idea, although good in many areas, is still not enough for every retailer. This latest solution from theme parks can now bring new challenges, now retailers will need to manage each site for the different theme parks and get reports from each one.

So what if there was a solution that was integrated to all the theme parks, and offered central reporting and controls. This is what I think retailers will be looking for in the future, a way to control and manage sales from all the different venues and across multiple locations.

iTicket POS is just that, a Point of Sale integrated into theme parks. Already we have integrated with the largest and easily the most complex with a full closed loop integration with the Disney Ticket Integration and is currently in production with the integration with Sea World. Our plans include the ability to send guests to the theme park via iPhone or any other smart phone. This solution also will have the option of going totally paperless making a very "green" Point of Sale.

So while the era of vouchers will be coming to a close, I think "hard ticket inventory" or tickets printed by the theme parks will be coming to end soon.

What are your thoughts? Are you using these online portals? How do you like them?

About iTicket POS

Designed for the timeshare industry, iTicket POS is a complete enterprise POS software solution that enables your staff to sell and gift attraction tickets, dinner shows, and more. Monitor sales activity, collect critical pre-gift and gifting data, produce detailed reports and provide better customer service.